The Collapse

A regime disappears and chaos ensues.

The battle for the Republican Palace complex on Monday, April 7th, the day the first American tanks appeared in the center of Baghdad, had a symphonic quality. Much of it was boom and bang—heavy concussive thumps from tank fire and bombs, the ripping bursts of rockets—but there was also a rhythmic noise, like a huge steel drum being pounded, and, frequently, a great grinding sound. The light clatter of automatic-weapons fire joined in now and then underneath it all. I was watching the battle from the balcony of a room at the Sheraton Hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris, across the river from the palace grounds, which cover hundreds of acres in central Baghdad. Several times, I heard a loud crackling, like metallic popcorn popping—ammunition dumps exploding. F-18 fighter jets, which had replaced the B-52s that had been dropping bombs on Baghdad for two weeks, hit the palace area and screamed off again. The grinding noise was coming from the guns of low-flying A-10 Warthogs, firing four thousand bullets per minute.

Oil fires had been set on the sandy embankment of the river just opposite the hotel, and by mid-morning black smoke was billowing toward us. Just about then a new dust storm, a turab, started up, and the smoke and the dust melded into a yellow haze that obscured the battle, which continued for most of the day. The Minister of Information, Muhammad Said Al Sahaf, gave a surreal press conference in the Palestine Hotel, next door. He claimed that “there are no American infidels in Baghdad,” and said that journalists, particularly those from Al Jazeera, were lying about what they saw. He spoke with bonhomie and apparent conviction. I assume he believed that we were not so different from the citizens of Iraq, who had long since lost the ability to call a lie a lie, or to contradict anything they were told by officials. A bus tour for the press corps was organized, and we drove down Sadoun Street, parallel to the Tigris but out of sight of American tanks. The city was pretty much deserted, except for a few fighters here and there, most of them in civilian clothes, with red-and-white checked head scarves. Some of the men carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They flashed us the V sign. The tour lasted only about ten minutes, and I was told that it was to demonstrate that the Ministry of Information hadn’t been taken.

Later, when the dust cleared, I could see, through binoculars, an American soldier dangling his legs from the embankment across the river, just in front of two tanks. He gazed at the water, apparently unconcerned about snipers. Another soldier joined him, and they sat there together for a while. Someone shot at the sandy place where Iraqi soldiers had been entrenched earlier in the day, and a fire broke out amid many small explosions. Another ammo dump must have been hit. White sparks and projectiles formed rapid tracers of light and flew off in all directions. Some of them arced high up and out in loops, like fireworks, and landed in the river.

In the middle of the afternoon, my driver, Sabah, said that he would go out and get us some lunch. There were only a couple of restaurants still open in central Baghdad by then, and he decided to go to the Al Saah, a rather garish place in the heart of the Mansour neighborhood, on the west side of the Tigris. A few days earlier, Saddam Hussein had been videotaped walking in the streets of Mansour, high-fiving residents. The clients of the Al Saah are mostly young and upper middle class, but families also go there, as well as military officers. There are usually a few BMWs and a Mercedes or two parked outside. Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein’s sons, were said to be regulars, although I never saw them there.

Sabah was in the restaurant for about twenty minutes, waiting for our orders of chicken tikka. He paid for the food, then got into his car and drove away. He had gone about half a mile, he said, when there was a tremendous explosion behind him. A bomb had landed next to the Al Saah. He came back to the hotel and picked up me and another journalist, Paul McGeough, of the Sydney Morning Herald, and we went to see what had happened. The windows of the Al Saah, and those of the buildings around it, had been blown out. Clods of earth and debris and shards of glass stretched for blocks. The interiors of stores were covered with powder and looked as if they had been hit by a tornado. Several mannequins in a bridal shop lay next to one another in white satin dresses. Down a side street, about a hundred yards from the restaurant, a crowd had gathered in front of a devastated house, its garden heaped with dirt and chunks of brick and mortar and a broken date palm. A pit about thirty-five feet deep and sixty feet across had been opened up in front of the house. The metal headboard of a bed was in the pit, and an advertisement for a billiard table. I asked an Iraqi man what had been there before the explosion. “Four houses,” he said.

A wide-eyed middle-aged woman came up to me. In English, she said that her name was Maria Marcos and that she was a secretary at the German Embassy. She lived just down the block. She believed that nine people had died, although only one body had been retrieved so far. A man wept inconsolably in the arms of another man. Three other men sat on a curb, tears streaming down their faces. An F-18 roared overhead, and people ran down the street in fear. A young man who was standing in the trashed garden of the house next to the pit said that his name was Ayad and that the house belonged to his grandfather. He pointed him out to me: an old man in a bloodstained shirt, his head bandaged, who was wandering around on the veranda. Ayad had heard a roar and had seen a yellow missile, about the size of a date palm, crash and explode in a white light. It had hit the house next door, which belonged to Um Salman, a widow who lived there with her two sons and two daughters. They had run a print shop nearby.

Ayad’s mother, Neda, invited us into her father’s ravaged home. She said that he was seventy-five and was a retired engineer. He had built the house and had lived there for forty-three years. There was rubble everywhere, and the stairs were filled with broken plaster and concrete. Neda showed us around. “I think this is from God,” she said. “I think maybe God wants us to suffer this. I am satisfied.” I took her to mean that she was thankful that no one in her immediate family had died, and that she bore no hatred toward anyone for what had happened.

We learned later that Saddam and his sons and other officials were believed to have been meeting there, and that four “bunker buster” bombs had been dropped on the site. There were also reports that Saddam had been having lunch at the Al Saah, but no one seemed to give them much credence, although Sabah told me that he had heard, in the way that Iraqis do, by word of mouth, through friends and neighbors, that Qusay, Saddam’s younger son, had eaten lunch in the restaurant the day before.

When I woke up the next morning, a terrific battle was taking place in the palace complex and the nearby neighborhoods. A fireball shot up from the round roof cavity of the Baath Party headquarters, a massive stone building that had been under reconstruction after being destroyed by American and British bombs in 1991 and 1998. There were more blasts near the Al Rashid Hotel, and all up and down the riverbank opposite the Sheraton, between the Jumhuriya Bridge, which crosses the Tigris in front of the palace complex, and the Sinak Bridge, less than a mile north, near the Information Ministry. Everything in that area seemed to be getting bombed, rocketed, strafed, or machine-gunned.

Two Abrams tanks had advanced into the open on the Jumhuriya Bridge. They crouched there like predatory beasts, swivelling their guns to and fro. Bursts of what looked like rocket fire arced into the air toward them, apparently from Iraqi forces. A Warthog looped slowly over the river. On its third or fourth pass, I saw the façade of the Ministry of Planning, a ten-story building, explode into a thousand bursts of white light and flying glass. Then an F-18 appeared, flying low, and bombed a building on the opposite bank. I thought I could hear the sound of helicopter rotor blades.

Someone knocked on my door. It was James, the Sudanese room cleaner. Most hotel services, including laundry and, sometimes, the water and electricity, had been cut off, but James had come to clean my room. He took me to the other side of the hotel, where we looked out a window and saw two Apache gunships circling about five miles away. James said that they were attacking the Al Rashid military garrison, on the east side of town, which has its own airport. I went back to my room and watched the tanks on the bridge, and others hidden behind them, begin a fearsome barrage on the Board of Youth and Sports, one of Uday Hussein’s fiefdoms, which was on our side of the river. They seemed to be taking sniper fire from the building, and they fired shells into it, hitting, as far as I could see, most of its floors. They also fired into the edge of the city and the fringe of trees on our side of the bridge. The area around the Al Safeer Hotel, where I used to stay, was hit, as was the riverside block near the street where Karim, my barber, has his little shop.

Someone in the hall yelled that the Palestine had been fired on, and I looked down and saw a crowd of people, mostly journalists, rushing outside. Our elevator wasn’t working, so I ran down twelve flights of stairs and over to the Palestine’s driveway, which was full of people. The fifteenth floor had been struck by something, no one knew what, and three reporters had been badly wounded. We all milled around in our flak jackets, and then someone else said that the offices of Al Jazeera and of Abu Dhabi television, which were situated in old villas on the opposite bank of the river, between the two bridges where the fighting had been taking place all morning, had also been bombed, and that an Al Jazeera reporter had been killed. A car pulled up, and a friend of mine, a French photographer, Jerome Delay, emerged, sobbing. He had taken a wounded Reuters cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, to the hospital, and Protsyuk had died there. Not long afterward, we learned that the Palestine had been hit by American tank fire. It was claimed that snipers had been firing from the hotel, although the journalists who were living there said that this did not seem to them to be true.

I went with several other reporters to the Al Kindi Hospital, where one of the wounded journalists, José Couso, had been taken. By the time we arrived, he was in the operating room. I had interviewed the head of medical services at the hospital, Dr. Osama Saleh, a few days before, and he recognized me and shook my hand. He said that it was the worst day he had ever spent as a doctor, that even in Iraq’s previous wars there had not been injuries on the scale he was now seeing among ordinary civilians. At least a hundred wounded people had been brought in since the morning, and his staff was overwhelmed. Three children had died there that day.

We walked to the morgue, a small building at the rear of the hospital. The concrete pathway was spattered with blood. Several hypodermic needles lay on the ground. Bloody gurneys were parked outside the morgue, and there was a big bloodstain in front of it, along with a clump of black hair. An attendant in filthy clothes was talking to two reporters from Al Jazeera. They had come to identify the body of Tariq Ayoub, the man who had been killed in the attack on the Al Jazeera offices. Ayoub was a Jordanian reporter who had arrived in Baghdad from Amman a couple of days earlier. As a favor, he had brought in some cash for me and several other reporters. His body lay inside with about twenty others in a promiscuous jumble. One of the two Al Jazeera reporters started to talk to me and then began weeping and walked away.

Fifteen or so doctors and nurses were working on patients in adjoining white tiled cubicles with green curtains in the emergency ward. A woman behind one of the curtains was wailing in anguish, and I could hear fists thumping on a wall. Nurses were walking around in tears. A man whose entire body had been burned was lying on a gurney in the corridor, his skin a mass of black and red flesh. His face was covered with bandages. I assumed that he was dead, but then I noticed that he was breathing. A woman who was naked from the waist down and covered with blood was being sponged off by a nurse. As much as the nurse scrubbed, she did not seem to be able to get rid of the blood. The woman’s body was a smeared orange color. Two children, a brother and a sister, lay together on a gurney. The girl was bloodied and the boy appeared to be sleeping. A hospital attendant pulled a cloth over their bodies. Their mother was the woman I had heard wailing and hitting the walls. I went outside. The children’s father was there, sobbing. Two soldiers rushed up and asked doctors about a friend. Anti-tank rockets stuck out of their backpacks, and they both carried Kalishnikovs. The doctors said that they could come inside if they put their weapons down. They argued about this and then agreed. About ten minutes later, they came out, looking upset and angry, and collected their guns and walked away. Back at the hotel, we heard that José Couso had died. Paul Pasquale, another Reuters journalist who had been injured, was being treated for a severe leg wound. Marines had secured the Al Rashid military garrison and were moving into the city. Another contingent was reported to be coming in from the north. The tanks that had sat all morning on the Jumhuriya Bridge were gone.

There was a cool breeze now, and I sat on the balcony of my hotel room, watching large black long-necked birds wheel around. White terns fluttered near the bulrushes on the Tigris. A hawk, or maybe an eagle, drifted high above. As dusk approached, two F-18s came roaring past and dived repeatedly at the Board of Youth and Sports, sometimes together, sometimes singly. As one of them spiked downward out of the sky, a rocket burst from its pod, plunged into the building, and exploded. The plane lunged upward and away again. There was a sudden whoosh from the trees on the riverbank about three hundred yards west of us, just down Abu Nawas Street. It was a heat-seeking missile, and it swooped up in a white vapor trail, chasing the closest American jet. A few seconds later, it disappeared into the clouds. It had missed. The F-18s stayed around for about forty minutes, then flew away. Night fell. A candlelight vigil was being held for the dead journalists on the front lawn of the Palestine Hotel.

The Palestine had been the Information Ministry’s headquarters for several days, but on Wednesday morning no officials showed up, just some low-level minders, and they looked lost. We heard that Saddam City, a large workers’ slum in northeastern Baghdad, was being looted, and I drove in that direction with some other journalists, on a divided highway full of cars moving erratically, past the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of Transport, which were being ransacked by men and boys. Smoke was coming out of the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters, a modern office building set away from the main road. Uday Hussein was the director of the Olympic committee, and people were said to have been tortured and killed regularly in the building. Uday had a large stable, and his horses were being stolen, too. A boy on a big black Thoroughbred cantered by, bareback. At an overpass near Saddam City, two dozen athletic-looking young marines wearing helmets and flak jackets and holding weapons, their faces covered with dust, emerged from four or five armored personnel carriers. We said hello and explained who we were, and they all said hello back, but kept their eyes on the chaotic traffic, made up almost entirely of looters, which surged up the road in all directions toward Saddam City. The marines had apparently been instructed to bring this to a halt, and two of them went into the road. Drivers honked and stuck their thumbs up and shouted “Bush good!” but, if they didn’t stop, the marines crouched down and pointed their rifles at them. The marines were having a hard time getting things under control. A car that had been ordered to stop kept crawling forward, and one of the marines put his gun in firing position and screeched, “Stop your fucking car right now.” The car stopped.

People were waving white flags. Someone leaned out of his car window and ostentatiously tore up a two-hundred-and-fifty-dinar note, embossed with Saddam’s portrait. He threw it at the feet of one of the marines, who looked nonplussed. I told him what it was. “Oh, damn,” he said. “I was supposed to get one of those as a souvenir for a friend.” I told him not to worry, that there were plenty of dinar notes around, and he went back to directing traffic. A boy driving a forklift over which he seemed to have minimal control smiled and made faces at the marines to indicate that he meant no harm. A truck came by pulling a stolen police car, its rear window smashed. Outside the warehouses of the Ministry of Trade, someone had left behind several boxes of sports shoes made in China, and men were trying them on. Most of the boxes contained only one shoe. More marines arrived. They had spray-painted names for each of their tanks and armored personnel carriers on the barrels of their guns: “Assassin,” “Carnage,” “Cold Steel,” “Crazy Train,” “Rebel,” and one that read, “Got Oil?”

I asked Khifa, my translator, how he felt about what we were seeing. “I am very, very happy,” he replied. “But I also feel like I want to cry. This is exactly what happened in 1991, and this is why Saddam was needed afterward. You know why? Because he represented the police station.”

We drove back downtown and along Abu Nawas Street. The Al Safeer Hotel’s windows had been blown out, but I was gratified to see that it had not been hit in the battle the day before. Near Karim’s barbershop, several men were trying to push a brand-new white government-issue Toyota Land Cruiser into a garage. What seemed like the whole neighborhood stood around watching. Some boys on Sadoun Street were carting off rolled-up Persian carpets in a wheelbarrow. The Jumhuriya Bridge was blocked by rubble, and there were some jumpy-seeming boys and young men with guns behind sandbags at the entrance to the Sinak Bridge. We went through a poor district where large numbers of young men lurked in a predatory manner. Sabah was driving, and he became very upset with me, because, he said, in this same place, a couple of hours earlier, a mob had stopped the car of some reporters. They had been beaten, and their equipment, their car, and all their money had been stolen.

We turned left onto one of the colonnaded streets of old Baghdad, trying to find a route into the western part of the city. A man with a limp came up to us and said that the Americans had shot and killed someone who had tried to cross a nearby bridge. He led us to the body of a young man. It was covered with a coarse cloth, and flies were buzzing around it. We heard shots nearby and decided to leave. At a traffic circle that led to another bridge, men in head scarves with automatic weapons and anti-tank rockets made no attempt to stop us. We followed some cars over the bridge and crossed an avenue that led to the Ministry of Justice. About two hundred and fifty yards ahead, we could see the lumbering khaki hulks of American tanks, facing in our direction. A man darted out into the street and waved us back. We turned around quickly, lest the tanks shoot at us, and drove back down the main street leading from the bridge, out of sight of the tanks. We were surrounded almost immediately by a dozen or so men, one of whom said to us that, Saddam or no Saddam, they would fight the Americans. The other men yelled in agreement, and some briefly chanted “Down Bush!” Two men wearing kaffiyehs like head scarves and carrying rocket launchers shouted something and disappeared in the general direction of the American tanks. We turned around and raced back across the bridge. Khifa said that the men were fedayeen, and had yelled “Clear the area,” and added that one of the men standing near us had whispered to him, “Get them out of here now.”

By the time we got back to the hotel, the marines had arrived, and the approach to the street was blocked by armored personnel carriers. We got out of the car and walked toward them. A man who was standing in a crowd gathered at the side of the road called out to ask us if we were Americans, and when we said yes the whole group began cheering and applauding us, clapping their hands as if they were at a performance in a theatre. Not long afterward, in the traffic circle in front of the hotel, a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by soldiers in an armored personnel carrier.

The next morning, the street leading to the Al Wiya Hospital in central Baghdad was full of looters. They were ransacking several other hospitals in the neighborhood. Al Wiya’s head doctor, Ali Walid, told me that several raids had been made on the hospital during the night and that another attempt had been made a few minutes before I arrived. They no longer had a sentry. A young man who worked for him had been throwing rocks at the attackers to keep them at bay. The Al Wiya was the only hospital still functioning in the area. All the others had been plundered. In the lobby, two dead men covered with blankets lay on cots, and three badly injured men were nearby. One of them was the driver of a Red Crescent ambulance. He had been, for some inexplicable reason, shot by marines at a roadblock. The damaged ambulance was parked in front of the main door of the hospital.

Paul Pasquale, the British journalist for Reuters who had been shot at the Palestine, was in one of the wards at the Al Wiya. His face was peppered with shrapnel wounds; bigger wounds on his torso had been stitched up. His legs were heavily bandaged. A couple of his Reuters colleagues were staying with him; they were trying to have him evacuated from Baghdad, but they said that this would take a couple of days. Some wounded Palestinian fighters had shared Pasquale’s room during the night, but they were gone, which was a relief to Pasquale, who feared that their presence might precipitate an American raid.

I went back to the Palestine and explained the situation at the Al Wiya to the Marine commander in charge, Lieutenant Colonel McCoy, a big strapping man who listened carefully. I told him that there was a British citizen there, a man who had been wounded when the American tank fired on the hotel. He and a junior officer pulled out a military map of Baghdad and I tried to show them where they should go. It seemed difficult to explain, so Sabah and I and a Frenchman working for Première Urgence, an organization that supplies emergency aid to hospitals, led a convoy of four or five Humvees to the hospital. The looting had intensified in our absence. A truck and a refrigerator nearly blocked one side of the road, and Sabah’s car just made it through the gap. The Humvee behind us pushed the refrigerator out of the way. When we arrived at the Al Wiya, the marines got into combat stances facing the hospital. I pointed out that it was the hospital that needed to be protected, and they turned around and took up positions at the entrance gate.The commander of the group, Lieutenant Danner, spoke to Dr. Walid and his staff, and before long everyone had calmed down and the soldiers were securing the perimeter of the building. They promised to stay there for the night. As I left, I heard them say that they had found a live grenade outside the wall.

That afternoon, we drove over to Jadriyah, a residential neighborhood in southern Baghdad, where senior Baathist officials, including Tariq Aziz, have villas. We were looking for a palace complex that Uday Hussein was said to have lived in. Several dozen marines had set up ambushes at a traffic circle, where a large bronze statue of Saddam had been toppled. Nearby, the burned-out carcass of an Iraqi ammunition truck was surrounded by hundreds of rockets, some of which looked as though they had not yet exploded. The side streets had been blocked by residents trying to protect their property, and we left our car and driver on the main road and began walking. The people we met along the way seemed wary, but said hello when we did. The marines at the gates of Uday’s compound let us through. Inside there were five neoclassical limestone palaces with domes and ostentatious pillared entrances. Two of them had been heavily bombed, and parts of their roofs had collapsed into slag heaps of debris. All the palaces had ornate fretwork, heavy bronze doorknobs, and carved wood door panels, with ornamental brass and enamel inlay. A crystal chandelier had crashed onto the debris in the foyer of one palace, and was covered with gray dust. The place was swarming with marines, looking around, lying in the flower beds, listening to radios. They had arrived the night before, they said. The word “Texas” was scrawled on the entrance wall of one of the palaces.

The rear garden of another palace had a swimming pool and a stone reproduction of the Venus de Milo. Two snarling porcelain leopards guarded the entrance to the palace next door, which had inlaid marble floors and a white marble staircase that divided in two halfway up. A huge portrait of Saddam with his family hung on the landing. The portrait had been constructed out of colored marble. This palace had a private dental clinic, a mauve-and-pink beauty salon, and huge bathrooms with gilded taps and step-down baths. A carved teak loveseat sat in front of a window with a view of the Tigris. Children’s scooters lay on the floor in some of the downstairs reception rooms. In one bedroom, there was a brand-new McCulloch chain saw on a sofa next to the bed, its yellow box on the floor. There were four more chain saws, still in their boxes, in a walk-in closet. A refrigerator in another bedroom was stocked with rows of Clarins Extra-Firming Concentrate, Gentle Night Cream, and Eye Contour Gel; there was also a crate of kiwi fruit and tins of Korean Red Ginseng drink.

We moved on to another palace, where a marine told the photographers not to take pictures of the troops because they were “Intel.” A Marine officer was reading a copy of Playboy as he defecated into a milk crate. He waved when we passed. Some young marines hanging out around a Humvee festooned with photos from what looked like a perfume ad asked me if I had any news from the war. “We don’t have a clue what’s going on,” one of them said. I told them what I knew; one appeared to be keenly interested, but the others looked bored. A marine who was lying down inside the Humvee asked me whether it was true that Madonna and J.Lo had died together in some accident. Not that I knew of, I said.

As we left the compound, we passed some marines who were sitting on the curb of the palace driveway, consuming Meals Ready-to-Eat and smoking cigars. They waved in a friendly way. “Are those Cuban cigars?” I asked. “From the Man’s private stash?” A few of the men smiled and gave me the thumbs-up sign. “Only the best for us,” one replied, with a laugh. On the avenue running along the line of riverside villas, thugs in cars, some of them loaded up with loot, cruised by. We heard gunshots here and there. ♦

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